Te Reo the Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand Volume 61 Issue 2 (Special Issue) Linguistics in New Zealand: Personal Histories Contribution Type: Essay 2018 Pages 95-113 November 2018 Memoirs of an anthropological linguist Andrew Pawley Australian National University This paper is a peer-reviewed contribution from https://www.nzlingsoc.org/journal ©Te Reo – The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand Editor: Laurie Bauer Andrew Pawley 95 Memoirs of an anthropological linguist Andrew Pawley I’ve had a fairly complicated career, in that I’ve taught at universities in several different countries and done research on quite a diverse range of topics1 A large part of my research and teaching has been concerned with the description and historical development of Austronesian and Papuan languages (which together number about 2000, or almost a third of the world’s languages) and with what linguistics and other disciplines can tell us about the history of human settlement in the Pacific. Other bits have to do with such matters as the role of speech formulae in nativelike command of a language, short term memory constraints on encoding speech, Australian Vernacular English, English rhyming compounds, cricket commentaries, ethnobiology, and the craft of lexicography. I’ve been very fortunate in having mentors and colleagues who provided inspiration and opportunities at various key points. I also owe a huge debt to my wife, Medina, who has managed family and job during my frequent lengthy absences on fieldwork and has spent years hosting speakers of Pacific Island languages who have come to live with us. I was born in Sydney but had a mobile childhood. My parents, both graduates of the University of Sydney, separated when I was two. I did not meet my father again till I was 33; for most of his career as an agricultural economist he was based in Rome. My mother’s profession as a high school teacher took her to many places and I attended about 12 different primary schools, chiefly in her home state of Tasmania and in New Zealand. High school years, from 1954 to 1957, were more stable – I went to Napier Boys High, on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. There I played quite a lot of sport and did English, French, History and Geography for University Entrance (UE) exams, and taught myself a bit of German on the side. 1958 was a watershed year. The connections I made in the course of that year pretty much determined the direction of the rest of my life. At the end of 1957, when I was 16, I decided to leave school and go to the University of Auckland to study anthropology. Customarily, after getting the UE qualification, students with an academic or sporting bent would stay on at high school for another year in order to study for national scholarship exams and/or play for the schools’ elite sporting teams. I had no real chance of getting a national scholarship – there were only a few offered and they favoured maths and science students. Anyway, in those days there were no fees for university enrolment – all you had to do was ‘get UE’ and roll up. I had developed certain intellectual enthusiasms that I was keen to pursue at university. In particular I’d become interested in human origins as revealed by archaeology, the fossil record and study of the primates. While at high school I scoured the city library’s shelves for books in this field. I remember reading Earnest ©Te Reo – The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand 96 Memoirs of an anthropological linguist Hooton’s Up from the Ape from cover to cover. I also read Mario Pei’s The Story of Language but I don’t recall that it made a deep impression. Late in 1957 I gained an interest in the Maori language. This was less intellectual in origin – more of a case of cherchez la femme (or les femmes). That year my mother was employed to teach English and other subjects at Hukarere College for Maori Girls, a private boarding school in Napier. It fell to her to direct the school’s annual theatrical production. She chose the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ‘Oklahoma!’ and for some reason decided to rewrite the story and librettos to set it in China. I helped a bit with the rewriting and attended some of the rehearsals. I was captivated by the beautiful singing voices and lively personalities of the girls and thought “I’d like to know more about the Maori world. I must learn Maori”. In December – though hampered by a 7 days a week holiday job on the night shift at Wattie’s Canneries in Hastings – I made a start, studying H. W. Wills’ Lessons in Maori and listening to Wiremu Parker’s weekly news broadcasts in Maori, with the aim of enrolling in Maori Studies at Auckland. At that time a BA degree at Auckland consisted of nine units encompassing about 20 ‘papers’ (courses) divided between five different subjects, including at least one Stage III unit. I enrolled for Stage I Anthropology, English and French. My attempt to enrol in Stage I Maori Studies was rebuffed. Maori Studies was administratively placed with the Department of Anthropology but was a separate subject. The head of Maori Studies, Bruce Biggs, had just returned, having taken two years leave to do a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Indiana. He was a rather stern-looking man in his mid-30s. When I approached him for permission to enrol he asked “Do you have a UE pass in Maori?” To obtain that I would normally have had to do four years of Maori at high school. I said “No, I’ve been studying Maori for the last two months.” – “That’s not exactly the same, is it?” – “No, but I’m very keen!” – “Well, let’s see what you’ve learnt.” He asked me a few questions in Maori. I was able to reply quite well and he said “You seem to have some talent for this but I advise you to do a year’s private study and we’ll look at it again next year.” Despite the rebuff, Biggs engaged me to help him catalogue his large collection of tape recordings of Maori oratory and news broadcasts. For a few weeks I would come and work in a little annex to his office in the old bungalow that housed the Anthropology and Maori Studies staff. The academic staff consisted of two social anthropologists, one archaeologist, and one lecturer in Maori Studies, supplemented by a few part-time lecturers and tutors. Head of Department was Professor Ralph Piddington, an Australian social anthropologist, who came from Edinburgh to found the Department in 1950. The staff were friendly and inclusive and I was soon on first name terms with most of them. Lectures in Anthropology I were a mixed bag. Jack Golson, a charismatic young Englishman, gave fascinating accounts of the archaeology of the Palaeolithic and the Middle-Eastern Neolithic. But my naïve visions of a career as a fossil hunting anthropologist faded. The part-time lecturer on the evolution of Homo sapiens was a dentist, whose weekly lecture at 7 pm generally consisted of telling us, for a whole hour, in a monotonous voice, to underline particular sentences or paragraphs in the textbook. Ralph (pronounced ‘Rafe’) Bulmer, a 6 foot 6 Englishman, newly arrived from doing a PhD at the Australian National University, gave excellent introductory lectures on social anthropology, largely illustrated by descriptions and slides of New Guinea highland communities among whom he had Andrew Pawley 97 done fieldwork. A few years later Bulmer invited me to join him in a research project in New Guinea, a project that continues to this day. Anthro I also included a couple of lectures by Bruce Biggs on the linguistic analysis of Maori. His lecturing style could only be described as dry, but he outlined methods of analysis that were satisfyingly rigorous and clear and this clicked a switch in my brain. Joining the University Maori Club took me into a new world. Maori students at the U. Auckland were not many in those days, maybe around 30 or 40. They were nearly all from country places and the Maori Club was their family away from home. The group had a very active social life. Every weekend there were parties at someone’s house or flat, filled with singing, and one evening a week there were practices for concert party performances. I practised with the concert party and after a while joined their performances at venues in Auckland such as the Auckland Prison and the Maori Community Centre. I had never been part of anything like this and I loved it. Occasionally we made bus tours to visit Maori communities in distant parts of the country. These trips were a good introduction to the impressive formal rituals of Maori society. On arriving at a marae (ceremonial centre) our party, as guests, who were initially tapu (ceremonially restricted, set apart from the hosts), were greeted with a welcoming lament by women of the place paying respects to the dead, speeches were exchanged, after which the degree of tapu of the guests was reduced and we’d line up and press noses and shake hands with the hosts. After a communal meal the guests and hosts would retire to the wharenui (large meeting house) where mattresses had been laid out and speech-making in Maori would resume and sometimes go on till the small hours.